For Freshmen, the Best Position May Be on the Sideline

CLEVELAND — Willie Cauley-Stein was surrounded Wednesday afternoon, answering the standard questions about the Kentucky basketball team’s unbeaten streak and its next big game, against tough-talking West Virginia on Thursday night.

For a change of pace, I asked Cauley-Stein, who scored 8 points and had three blocks in Kentucky’s 39-point victory, what he thought about the recent push to discuss reinstating freshman ineligibility, which was the rule in college sports until 1972.

Cauley-Stein has an uncommon perspective: He is a junior in a program known for its freshmen, an upperclassman in a sport whose best players routinely depart for pro riches after one or two years of college.

He said making freshmen ineligible was a terrible idea.

“All you do is practice?” he said. “You don’t play games? I just don’t see anything good that can come out of that.”

But given where we are today in high-profile, high-stakes, highly commercialized intercollegiate athletics, if ever there were a time to make freshmen ineligible, it would be now. Yes, it might serve the interests of the N.B.A. by providing a more mature crop of rookies, and yes, it would push back the players’ pro paydays by at least a year.

What the players, with their eyes focused on rich contracts, do not realize is that freshman ineligibility might actually be good for them.

We are a nation obsessed with youth sports, with travel teams and extra coaching and specialty camps. Those who can afford it, and even those who cannot, put children on a nonstop conveyor belt almost from the time they can walk. Having athletes take a year off from that rat race could be a blessing, and not just for football and basketball stars.

Freshman eligibility has been great for coaches, players and the vast array of Amateur Athletic Union coaches and advisers who serve as circus managers for young talent. It has not been great for the integrity of the academic institutions that house the athletic programs, which have repeatedly been embarrassed by various schemes to get talented athletes into college and keep them eligible once they arrive.

This is what concerned the Harvard president Charles Eliot in 1889 when, to his dismay, he discovered that the grades of freshman football players over a two-year period were distressingly low. In 1903, Harvard became the first major university to establish freshman ineligibility. Other colleges followed suit, but some did not. In fact, some used freshman eligibility as a recruiting tool.

According to news reports, some are already using it against the Big Ten after its commissioner, Jim Delany, raised the idea of merely discussing reinstating freshman ineligibility.

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Cauley-Stein, right, and Nerlens Noel, left, were freshmen together, but Noel departed for the N.B.A. after one year at Kentucky.CreditJason Decrow/Associated Press

The N.C.A.A.’s decision to allow freshmen to play — for most sports in 1968 and for football and basketball in 1972 — seemed at the time like a powerful, liberating moment for incoming student-athletes. Players could leap right from high school into college starting lineups. Freshmen became game-changers for teams and job-savers for coaches.

But the N.C.A.A.’s decision, which was based on the economics of maintaining separate freshman sports teams, marked the return of the same academic and intellectual compromises that concerned Harvard’s Eliot nearly a century earlier.

In an interview before the recent Pacific-12 Conference tournament, the league’s commissioner, Larry Scott, backed the push for a debate for restoring freshman ineligibility, saying that it “would be a very dramatic way to make the statement that the expectation is that the students be integrated in school; they’ll be going to class; they’ll be staying eligible and have a chance to get their sea legs under them as students before they’re kind of thrown into the competitive caldron of intercollegiate athletics.”

Competitively, throwing first-year players into the fire is popular because it works. Kentucky’s recent basketball teams have been the best example of what a class of great freshmen can do for a program. The Wildcats, who won the national championship in 2012, have been to three of the past four Final Fours and are widely expected to return to another next week.

“Coming here, you’re thrown to the hounds,” Cauley-Stein said of playing at Kentucky. “Honestly, it’s like being thrown into the Army. The way you have to approach it is, you’re all freshmen, you’re all young, you’re all brand new, and then you’ve got maybe two guys who’ve been through it, and those are the dudes you look up to.

“They’ve been through all this. They show you what things people get away with, what things you absolutely can’t do. How you balance class and school and other stuff outside, then working out twice a day. As a freshman, you’re thrown right into that. It’s good for you. It makes you go through adversity.”

But in making an argument against freshman ineligibility, Cauley-Stein inadvertently makes a strong case for sitting out. As a junior, he now has something that a freshman cannot acquire: context, expanded frames of reference, experience.

Cauley-Stein looked back at his freshman year at Kentucky and recalled how challenging it was. He was a backup to another freshman, Nerlens Noel, who turned pro after one season.

“The freshmen who come here this year, they have a chance to do something like be undefeated,” he said. “When I was a freshman, we were considered one of the worst teams to come to Kentucky.”

As others left, he stayed as two more waves of top freshmen arrived. Because of that, he has matured as a person and a player, and his draft stock has remained high. But he remains an exception to the rule.

Unlike a college classroom, the pro sports locker room is not an atmosphere devoted to intellectual stimulation and personal growth. The upside is you get paid.

In an industry in which money rules, that will probably be enough to keep any notion of freshman ineligibility on the bench.

Email: wcr@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B12 of the New York edition with the headline: For Freshmen, the Best Position May Be on the Sideline. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe